As a kid, one peculiar hobby I had was ant-watching. I spent countless hours in silence, observing their tireless venture for food. How did they carry things double their weight? How did they find their way back home?
I did not realize it then, but that childlike wonder was at the very heart of scientific inquiry. Yet, this untethered pursuit of knowledge is in danger of disappearing today.
Established in 1950, the National Science Foundation homes the idea of basic science: research driven by curiosity, with its sole objective being acquiring knowledge rather than immediate practical use. However, President Donald Trump’s recent budget proposal seeks to cut more than $5 billion — a 57% reduction — from the National Science Foundation, slashing its funding to just $4 billion.
The immediate aftermath would be gut-wrenching. Hundreds of thousands of scientists would lose support, with grant recipients shrinking from $330,000 to $90,000.
“Unfortunately, the value of a basic scientific discovery is often lost on people,” said Carly Anne York, the author of “The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science.” “And particularly, it seems, on politicians.”
Often dismissed by critics as frivolous and impractical, curiosity-driven research is, in fact, the engine behind some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs.
In 1997, physicist Andre Geim levitated a frog using a magnetic field — an experiment in his quoted “Fun Friday Afternoon Projects” that fell outside of his team’s usual scope of research. A decade later, that same curiosity led Geim and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov to find graphene, earning them the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The origin of the discovery started as a whimsical attempt at scraping the surface of graphite using scotch tape during one of their “Fun Fridays.”
Similarly, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was widely regarded as purely theoretical until it found practical application in technologies such as GPS in the late 20th century. The academic home of Einstein’s revolutionary ideas is “paradise” for scholars. Researchers were free from administrative duties and encouraged to pursue “useless“ knowledge without interference.
In the past 75 years, the National Science Foundation fueled the careers of over 250 Nobel laureates and attracted over 12,000 grant applicants each year. How much longer would scientific progress have been delayed if Einstein’s curiosity about the universe had been dismissed as impractical or irrelevant? This sudden dismantling will leave countless bright minds stranded before their potential is fully realized.
What may be even more alarming is the administration’s lavish spending on politically directed grants. Shortly after the cuts on the NSF, the excess funds flowed to military-affiliated programs across the United States.
One of which is the University of Maryland, which signed a $500 million contract — the largest one in the university’s history — with the Department of Defense. Similarly, at UMass Boston, the Department of Defense funded the Network AI Institute, a research program studying how local AI agents communicate and exchange data and information.
On 1The White House sent a letter to nine universities Oct. 1, offering them priority funding if they agree to the terms of the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The compact demanded that schools terminate diversity, equity and inclusion in admissions and programming, cap international enrollment at 15% and maintain “institutional neutrality” while adhering to these statutory requirements.
While some university leaders welcomed it as “an honor” to be considered among the nation’s elite institutions, others rejected it outright, concerned about the infringement on institutional autonomy.
The overhaul of federal funding toward research institutions is redefining the purpose of science. Rather than fostering genuine curiosity, science today has become a device to promote predetermined ideologies and beliefs. Has our nation come to a point where maintaining the partisan status quo is more important than shared progress?
How are university students, who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their education, able to defend their ability to think for themselves?
Students must realize their education should not be solely dependent on their schooling system. Whether it be ant-watching, levitating frogs or simply unplugging yourself from the internet for a walk in nature, education is more than completing assignments, studying for an exam and getting a good grade.
The act of genuine curiosity is more than silly science; it is our last defense to reclaim the ability to think for ourselves.
This article appeared in Vol. LX, Issue V, published Oct. 27, 2025.
